1143: Locatives without Prepositions? Jan 25, 2018

Latin is famous for its case-system, for while English uses word-order or prepositions to indicate syntactic function, some language use affixes. Even before Romans had their five cases (or six including the vocative) that students are familiar with now, there used to be more, including a distinct locative case for indicating location, though this all is still nothing compared to Finnish's fifteen cases. While Latin used the locative case, and English uses certain prepositions like 'to', and 'from', there are a few words where an exception is made. In both languages, the word for 'home' does not act conventionally; it is accusative in Latin and does not take a preposition in English. Nevertheless, in English, it is still considered to be locative because it describes a location where somebody is going to or coming from. People are certainly welcome to disagree; linguistics is not always about facts so much as it is about evidence-based claims that correspond to observation (like any science). It has now been observed, however, that other locatives (or at least what would be locatives) in some dialects of British English drop the prepositions in certain contexts, such as before store-names or other places that are well-established as being names for places. It may sound odd to some, but consider that most of the time, from given context, it should be fairly obvious that some word is locative, especially since there is already a word that everyone agrees can be locative without a preposition.
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